Slew of Web startups vies for job recruiting pie

EMPLOYMENT

Published 4:00 am, Friday, May 20, 2011

LinkedIn's soaring stock price demonstrated investors' enthusiasm for the business-minded social network, where hiring services account for almost half of its revenues.

But even as the company basked in seeing its shares skyrocket more than 100 percent on its first day of trading Thursday, a slew of San Francisco startups is already looking to disrupt the job recruitment industry yet again.

One website, Gild, uses a gaming approach to match employee and employer. Another startup, BranchOut, adds a career networking layer to Facebook. Meanwhile, Top Prospect allows outsiders to earn cash by participating in corporate referral programs.

Just this week, Burlingame recruitment startup Jobvite announced that it had raised $15 million, bringing its total funding to $30.5 million.

Elsewhere, New York's Jibe uses social networking to connect people to jobs at their friends' employers, and Colorado's RoundPegg uses psychological self-assessments in an effort to become the "eHarmony for your employment process."

Although each of these startups takes a different approach to professional matchmaking, all of them hope to carve out a piece of the $20 billion recruiting industry.

"If you talk to any company right now, they'll tell you the biggest problem they have is not being able to find the right people," said Sheeroy Desai, CEO of Gild, which is approaching 500,000 members. "And yet, while employment in the valley is picking up, there are still a lot of people out there looking for jobs. Our view has always been that there is a significant amount of inefficiency in the hiring process."

Gild, which launched with a focus on hiring in the technology sector, encourages users to win "certifications" in a variety of areas including programming, enterprise software and written communication. The certifications can help talented employees of lesser-known companies come to the attention of larger corporations like Oracle and Sapient, both of which sponsor competitions on the site.

The competitions allow companies to raise their profiles among engineers, important at a time when engineers' services are in high demand. The majority of Gild users are drawn to the learning and competition aspects of the service, and aren't actively seeking new jobs, according to the company.

"And those are precisely the sort of people these companies are trying to reach out to," Desai said.

Jeremy Ciske, a budding developer of video games in Salt Lake City, has spent several months on Gild earning achievements in everything from spoken English to programming in C++.

"It's like, OK, what achievement can I get today?" said Ciske, 35, with a laugh.

Beyond the thrill of victory lies the hope that the employers who sponsor Gild's competitions are paying attention. Ciske is optimistic.

"I definitely believe there's a good possibility that I'll find a job from Gild," he said.

Web old recruiting tool

The idea that the Web can ease the hiring process is almost as old as the Web itself. Monster.com and other job-search engines arrived along with the Web browser in the mid-1990s.

But executives at newer startups say recent technological innovations can be exploited for recruiting purposes, including advances in social networking, organizational research and the use of game mechanics.

Embedded in each of the startups is the idea that as the world has improved technologically, the hiring process hasn't kept pace.

"The recruiting industry is enormous," said Rick Marini, BranchOut's founder and CEO, whose previous company was acquired by Monster.com. "With advances in technology and social recruiting, a lot of companies want to take advantage of that - including BranchOut."

Marini decided to found BranchOut after attempting to use Facebook to see which of his friends worked at a particular company. Existing search tools made it difficult, if not impossible. But Facebook had recently opened up its platform to allow outside developers to harness users' social connections, and Marini saw a business opportunity.

Investors saw the opportunity as well - last week, BranchOut raised $18 million from venture capitalists, bringing the 10-month-old company's total funding to $24 million. Since launching Jan. 1, the site has amassed 500,000 registered users.

Companies work with BranchOut to publish job listings directly to Facebook users' news feeds, and users can search for personal connections they have at companies where they would like to work. BranchOut also incorporates game-like aspects, letting members earn badges for completing certain tasks and growing their networks.

Marini said that over time, the 700 million-member Facebook network will become the optimal place to find job leads.

"The strength of connection is much stronger on Facebook," he said. "It's your true support network. It's your friends and family who will help you get a sales lead, or get your resume at the top of the pile."

The founders of Jibe agree. The New York startup also taps Facebook and LinkedIn data to match users with friends who already work at companies the user wants to work for. Launched in January, it also automates much of the job application process. If a friend agrees to recommend a user, Jibe includes that information in a user's job application and submits it directly to the recruiter.

The referral information, which about 40 percent of Jibe applications include, has made Jibe-submitted applications attractive to companies like Microsoft and Levi's that use the service, founder Joe Essenfeld said.

"Jibe is a channel that just has higher quality applications," he said. "Recruiters see these applications and it's a different bucket. It's a bucket that doesn't have the spam and is a much more relevant source of applicants."

Not all are believers

Not everyone is persuaded that newer methods will trump the older ones. Dennis Crowley, who built the location-based social network Foursquare, imported the referral- and interview-heavy hiring process used by his former employer, Google. Many of the early people he hired were friends from Google.

"That's a structure that makes sense to us, because we all used to work together, and we used to work under that system," he said. "So we all play by those rules."

Arash Ferdowsi, co-founder and chief technical officer of San Francisco's Dropbox, said personal referrals remained his preferred method of hiring.

"We get someone who's really good, and we ask them, 'Who are the smartest people you work with? Who are the people who are better than you?' Then we get those people, and we keep playing that game."

Sometimes these companies buy entire startups just to win the services of the engineers who work for them - a process known as being "acqhired."

Gild's Desai said Foursquare and Dropbox are simply popular places to work right now, and probably would have an easier time of hiring than larger, more established companies that might not be on the radar of talented engineers.

"If you're hot right now, if you're (mobile-payments company) Square or Facebook, you're not having problems," he said. "But they're in the minority. The majority of companies, even really big brands, are having problems."

And that, he said, is where services like Gild come in.

San Francisco marketing consultant Stephen Fox stumbled on to Gild at a technology conference last year after leaving his job at Oracle.

Soon Fox was entering contests, winning himself an iPod Nano, but more importantly, he gained the incentive to learn new online skills that has helped him land clients.

But when it comes to attracting new clients, he said, he still relies on networking events where he can meet people face to face.

"That's brought me a lot more clients than getting a certification on Gild," he said.